The New Yorker Radio Hour - James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

James Taylor’s songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. Onstage at the New Yorker Festival, in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences—the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antônio Carlos Jobim—and played a few of his hits, even giving the staff writer Adam Gopnik a quick lesson. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're a James Taylor fan, what would you ask him? If you could ask him anything, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik got his chance. James, this evening runs the risk of being an episode in the Chris Farley show. But I don't know if you remember Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, when he would have people he admired on. which is say, do you remember when you wrote Fire and Rain? And say, that was great. And I could go through everything you've done

and simply stand here and sweat and say, that was great. But I will try, at least, to find out why it's all been so great. Thinking about your music, one of the things that's always sort of stunned me about it is when you first appeared, you had a distinctive way of playing the guitar, which wasn't like anybody else.

It's distinctive kind of voicings. And you had an amazing harmonic language. I always think when I go through your sheet music and see that wonderful song like Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight starts with an E minor ninth chord and then goes to a major seventh chord. Those weren't the C, A minor, F, G, progressions of pop music at the time.

Did you study music? How was it that the language of music came to be the language you speak so naturally? I studied cello when I was a kid. My parents thought it would be good for it. There were five of us. And so I got the cello and I played for about four years, badly, reluctantly. I was a bad student and I never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have

it take off and have its own momentum, its own reason to continue. But all along I noticed that the guitar was going to be it for me and I, I think, I think finally prevailed on my folks. We lived in North Carolina. My mother would bring little groups of us up on the train to Manhattan to expose us to something other than trees. And we... Was it art or music or... Yeah, it was the shows that she took you to? Museums and shows. Yeah. And the city itself. But, you know, my folks loved the Rogers and Hammersstein, Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter, My Fair Lady in South Pacific and Oklahoma, and some light classics and some folk music too.

And, of course, I loved Elvis and I loved the Beatles and I loved Ray Charles when I was exposed to those things. That's sort of the second tier of stuff I was exposed to. That amazed me too, and it just opened my eyes. And I wanted to explore that music and I wanted to sing it. I wanted to play it. But I was 12 when I got a guitar here in Manhattan at Shermers. Really?

The Shermer Music Company. So you drove up with your mother to... Well, we took the train up, and I think it was my mom and my dad on that trip. And we went to Shermer's and found a guitar. I saw the Fender Electrics, the shape, the amazing finish of them, the way they look, the chrome, the mother of toilet seat, you know, but they wouldn't go for it. So it was a classic guitar and I, you know, immediately I got, I'll show you what the first thing I ever played on it was. Simple, but it spoke to me and it, it was, it just immediately started making sounds that I wanted to hear more of.

And the cello never did it. You sold the cello at that point and pawned it on 46th Street. I don't know what happened to that damn cello. It's got to be around somewhere. I hope someone's playing it. And you started to compose just the way kids do, teenagers do on the guitar. You just chord to chord and idea to idea. What was the first song you ever wrote that you thought was a good song?

I wrote a song called, when I was 13 or 14, called Roll River Roll. It's pretty awful I can play it for you. Would you please? I don't think this is ever here. James Taylor's first song. Has this been widely covered, James? No, it hasn't been widely covered. And the fact that nobody here tonight has ever heard it is proof of how lame it was.

You know, it was really... This is something called Travis Picking that we all learned. Sort of a walking thumb. One or two fingers thrown in. Roll river road Long as you can be Longest river I've done seen Rove into sea

Went like that And then But you know the strange thing is James I never heard that It sounds like a James Taylor song You know I mean Yeah it does You know I mean

It's not the umpa part Maybe so much at the beginning but the way the the baseline goes down and goes to the and all of that and it's on the minor and so on the minor exactly

yeah in that yeah it does it had a certain it hints the things you will write yes if not everybody

I think everybody here knows that you went off to London eventually and you and you recorded that first record how old are you

when that when you did that James I was I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my recording contract with Apple Records with the Beatles. And that was such an amazing reversal of fortune for me. That was the door that opened and let me through to the life that I've lived ever since. It was my big break. I'd been at it since, you know,

when I went to, when I came to New York in 1966, and instead of graduating high school, I came here and I started with Danny Corkmore, a band called The Flying Machine, which was, it was ill-fated, and we had problems and, you know, typical problems and never got our recording deal that we needed. We signed one, but the people who signed it,

just they couldn't follow through with it. And after that, fell to pieces in 66, when I was 18, I went home to North Carolina to recover a little bit. I was, I needed soup, I needed a bed, you know, I needed my parents, I needed to go home. You know, my dad actually heard me on the phone. He, I called him in North Carolina from New York

and the band had been broken up for about a month and he could hear that I wasn't well and he said, you just stay right there, he got my address, he said, you stay right there, I'll be there in 10 hours and he was. That's wonderful. I just sat there for 10 hours and my dad showed up in a station wagon and took me home. That's one of my treasures, that little, that memory, that thing he did.

I wrote a song about it called Jump Up Behind Me. This land is a lovely green. It reminds me of my own home. Such children I've seldom seen even in my own home. The sky's so bright and clean. Well, speaking of that, one of the things that was so potent about your music when, as a very young man, people first started paying attention to it was that it seemed to be so amazingly, emotionally, emotionally accessible.

It seemed to sum up so many of the longings of a generation, so many people, a song like Rainy Day Man or something's wrong, and then more famously in the next go-round and the next group of songs, Fire and Rain, and those things. was it strange and difficult to have to see your own experience turning into songs and then becoming these kinds of universal vehicles for other people's feelings? Very strange indeed. And, you know, I think that that's, obviously you want success, you want to be heard, you want to be listened to and encouraged. But it's always that moment of going from the private thing.

And in the case of a singer-songwriter who doesn't have a bad songwriter who doesn't have a band was sort of going there with him and sort of a posse or a crowd or a tribe that's that's you're running with and doing it with when you're doing it alone and by yourself it is a very strange transition to make and I wrote songs about that too hey mister that's me up on the jukebox or fading away or so or company man those are songs about you know the difficulty of starting off with a very private and personal thing And as my friend David Crosby says, you know, the first album you make is the result of 10 years of work, then you've got a year to make the next one. But those first songs weren't written with an audience in mind, except in the most general sense.

They really were personal, like diary entries or poems that you write for yourself. But then when you take this stuff to market and engage the music business and the popular culture and all that stuff, it can be, that's a very interesting thing to try to negotiate and to make, to go public with it and to make a living, I'm sure that writing has a similar, there's a similar thing to it when you take your work to market.

But it had to be, you were saying it had to be peculiar Yes, of course, it's true for everyone, but a writer, maybe six people, read it. When a musician genuinely develops the following, it's millions of people who see your music as their internal, not just as your journal, but as their internal diary. And that's an extraordinarily rich time must be, you know, what's the first song of that body of work that you feel, a lot of it you still perform, that you feel is strong, is a finished song that you feel good about? I guess something in the way she moves is probably the first song that I had written knocking around the zoo and a song called Sunshine Sunshine before something in the way she moves.

And actually all the songs on the first album, some of them before, some of them after something in the way she moves. But that was the first one that I thought really worked as a song. You still do material from that period, and I know you've talked about a lot. But one of the things interest me, if you don't mind, just to fast forward a little bit, as a listener of yours, as a follower of yours, one of the things that seemed to me to be true, and I wonder if it was true, is that some, in the kind of mid-70s, you were searching a bit for a sound for work.

And then, beginning in the late 70s, you started doing a couple of things. You started doing covers for the first time. We started doing Motown covers, how sweet it is, and so on. And it seemed as though there was a kind of rebirth through sort of being free to do other people's work as well as yours and sort of shedding the skin of sweet baby James and of that material. Was that a fantasy or did you feel some of that? You know, it just wasn't very carefully considered ahead of time. All of those cover tunes that I would do were things that would be,

thought of at the spur of the moment in the recording studio after we had already recorded two songs that day. That's the way it was with how sweet it is. That's the way it was with Handyman. And we're going to be paying for it anyway. So you still feel strong and energetic. And Cooch says, why don't we try how sweet it is. James Taylor talking with Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival. Ahead this hour, we'll hear a live performance from James Taylor. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. James Taylor joined Adam Gopnik in conversation at the New Yorker Festival, and they talked there about how Taylor formed his very distinctive sound, which was so influenced by Brazilian music, and in particular, Antonio Carlos Jobim. You have that beautiful song, Only a Dream in Rio. Did Brazilian music open up your ears and your musical vocabulary? It sure did.

You know, I mentioned the Broadway series, stuff, the folk music and the light classics that my parents listened to and some satirical stuff, Tom Lair. The next level of that was what my brother Alex brought into the house. He brought Ray Charles and Joe Tex and Don Covey and the Hot Nuts and the, you know, which were a beach music band. And his stuff extended into some light jazz. And one of them was that that great album recorded in 1963 in three days here in Manhattan, Astrid Gilberto, Juan Giorberto, Girl from Ipanema. And ten and young and lovely, the girl from Ibanima goes walking and when she passes, each one she passes goes...

And that stuff had a huge effect on me. I love the chords. I love the, you know, for a guitarist, that Brazilian thing is just a rich vein to get into. And, man, I couldn't get enough. So, and I, you know, that song more recently, the... The La-la-da-da-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. The idea of that song is, it was sort of like one-note samba. It's just that da-na-da-da-da-da-da.

And then the changes... The harmony shape. Yeah, underneath it, and that's a very Brazilian, very Jobeam thing to do. So I was hugely impressed by that stuff, and it was a great source for me. What happened is I developed a little bit of a guitar style from playing Christmas carols... ...and hymns from school... God, that's Deutschland. Uberales too, isn't it?

That is. That's the part you want to keep quiet, if you can, James. That influence. You really want to. No, I only learned, I only came to realize that later. We can cut, we can edit right here. Hi. So, yeah.

No, the, the, I played hymns. I played Christmas carols, and it gave me that sort of very bedrock kind of west Western musical Bach harmony, that kind of thing. And from then I fell into the Beatles and Jobim. And it really, I found that I had enough of a technique to be able to adapt those things into it. But the technique itself, I think I'm playing Ray Charles, I think I'm playing Joe Beam, I think I'm playing Paul McCartney, Lennon McCartney, I think I'm playing Holland Dozy or Holland, I think, you know, but actually, or Sam Cook or Marvin Gay, but it actually

is put through this sort of narrow filter of my technique. Of your guitar, of your guitar fingering. And it makes it sound like James Taylor, like, you know, Carol's tune up on the roof, which we did all summer long and we did, we went back and forth between her version of it and mine. It started being like a... When this whole world starts Are Getting Me Down and people are just too much for me to fade

Well, when I adapted the tune and we did it it was like a When this old world starts are getting me down And people are just too much for me to fade I plan way up To the top of the stairs and all my cares he just need right and be. So that inner voicing of the, so now we know. Right, so it gets really. Beatles chords, Beatles beats, Brazilian chords, and Bach harmonies.

And you have James Taylor tune. It's just too painful to have James Taylor appear and not hear you play. Would you play a few things for us? That's okay. We were raised children. They were circles around the sun. Never give up, never slow down,

never grow, never ever die young. Synchronized with a rising moon, even with the evening star, they were true love, written in stone, they were never alone, they were down that far apart. And we who couldn't bear to believe they might make it, we got to close our eyes, to cut up our losses and to doable doses and rest in our tears and sighs,

you can see them on the street on a Saturday night. Everyone used to run them down. They're a little too sweet. They're a little too tight. They're not enough tough at this town. No. We couldn't touch him with a 10-foot pole. No, it didn't seem to rattle at all.

They refused to get body and soul. That much more with their backs up against the wall. Never do let them fall, prey to the dust and the rust and the ruin that names us, shames us, claims us all. I guess it had to happen someday soon. There was nothing to hold them down. They would rise from hummus like a big balloon. Take the sky and forsake the ground. Yes, other hearts were broken, and I know other dreams ran dry,

but our golden one sailed on and on to another land beneath another sky. Let other hearts be broken, let other dreams run dry, that our golden one sailed on and all to another land beneath another sky another sky I'm going to play that first song, very early song, first presentable song I think that I ever wrote. Well, there's something in the way she moves

looks my way or it calls my name That seems to leave this trouble world behind And if I'm feeling down in blue I'm troubled by some foolish game She always seems to make me change my mind I feel fine any time that she's around me now She's around me almost all the time If I'm well you can tell you can tell you.

tell she's been with me, she's been with me, quite a long, long time and I fear find every now and then the things I don't lose their meaning and I find myself convening into places where I should never let me go. It has a powder gold, no one else can find me, and a silent The happiness and good times that I know Well, I guess I just got to know them Isn't what she's got to say How she thinks of where she's been

The words are nice the way they sound I like to hear them best that way Doesn't much matter what they mean She says them mostly just calm me down. I feel fine any time that she's around. She's around me. I'm just about all the time. If I'm well, you can tell that she's been with me now.

She's been with me now. Quite a long, quite a long time for you. I have been playing. I have two children. And for the last 16 years, I've been playing, you can close your eyes for them every night when they go to sleep. And they always ask me, Daddy, did you make up that song? And I say, I did, actually.

But now they're here tonight, and they'll be aware that I didn't, actually. James did. But I wonder if on behalf of this audience, who I know are all moving their fingers, would you teach me to play that song properly? I will, indeed, yes. So let's get a guitar. Is there a guitar?

Could I get one? A guitar and plug it in. There is. Thank you. I bring two in case. These are Olson guitars made by a guy in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And he managed in 1985 to get one into a hotel room that I was checking into in Minneapolis. And I've never looked back.

So this is the first one that, and this is the most recent one he built. So this is so I'll take it home tonight. Now, we're in D, which Miles Davis said was the key that belonged to you. Well, it's true. I met Miles Davis once up on 94th Street, and it was, you know, it's one of those things that you take with you as a great, the great man, indeed, that he noticed me enough to mention. He said, you know, D's your key.

The Oracle has spoken. The Oracle is spoken, so that's it. And D was your kick. So we start on D. So it's... The sun is shorty singing here and down. That's good. Actually, before we go...

That is. Before we go any further, I sing this song at home too, and I've actually more and more recently gotten used to sing it with my dear wife, Kim, who is here, and I'm going to pull... She's going to kill him. Pull me up. Pull her up on stage.

Here somewhere. She is here, actually. Hi, Kim. Hello. Good. So this is sort of like open mic night. That's open mic night. That's right.

We are. We're going to, we're going to go out with a whimper here. Again. That was Adam Gopnik To his own world Must still be spinning around Still looking and go and sing That was Adam Gopnik on the guitar

Accompanied by James Taylor and his wife Kim I'm David Remnick Please join me next week And until then Have a great week The New Yorker Radio Hour Is a co-production of WNYC Studios And The New Yorker

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